I was with Nikki at the time. I say ‘with’, I mean, I was her source of fags. She was well fit - when you hugged her you could feel her ribs - but that wasn’t why I liked her. I liked her because she had this funny way of talking, like she was half-joking all the time. Sarcastic.
Anyway, it was only a quid, so we thought we give the ghost train a go. Just to take the piss, you know? So this old guy put this metal bar over our heads, for safety, and we rattled through these rubber doors into the darkness.
It was totally lame. Not even a special kid would find it scary. It was all coffins and skeletons and green lights. And crappy plastic bats. The lamest part of it all was that at one point we even saw one of the blokes who worked there, a kid of about our age, repairing some of the wiring!
And then we were back out in the wind and rain. We told the old guy about the bloke we’d seen – Nikki thought he might give us our money back. But the old guy checked his cameras and there was nobody in there. Then he showed us this newspaper clipping he had drawing-pinned to the inside of his booth, from about twenty years ago. There was a photo of the kid we’d seen. He was the old man’s son. It said:
Fairground worker killed while working on Ghost Train.”
